It Hyphened One Night

By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

Jones. What a wonderful surname. Clear. One syllable. Perfectly pronounceable. No hyphen.

The Sammataro-Hutchinses would love to keep up with the Joneses. "Forms aren't long enough to accommodate my whole name," says Debra Sammataro- Hutchins, who owns a children's clothing store in Melrose, Mass. Says her husband Robert: "My credit cards have me as Sammataro Hut. When I try to sign a check, I run out of room." The family's insurance reimbursements are bogged down because records do not match. The couple have to maintain an extra listing in the phone book so their children's friends can find them under Hutchins. "Ten years ago, when I married, I felt very strongly that I should retain my name," says Debra, nee Sammataro. "But it's been a nuisance ever since."

At 17 letters plus a hyphen, Sammataro-Hutchins is a bit much. Still, time has not been kind either to the Floyd-Bells, Church-Smiths and other conscientiously nonsexist, nonconformist couples who embraced hyphenation in the '70s as a banner of equality. The ubiquitous computer, for example, often seems incapable of recognizing hyphens. Says a Citibank spokesman: "This is not an insidious attack on our part. It's a program problem." Bureaucracies would rather set aside the mark altogether. In Bayside, N.Y., Dana Wissner- Levy, a graduate student at Hofstra University, had to take her battle to the school president before the registrar's office agreed to accept her hyphen.

Some psychologists worry about the ill effects of such nonconformity. Says family psychologist Alan D. Entin: "Kids get teased a lot when they have to explain the peculiarities of their family. The problem is that a kid knows when he or she is weird." Would the children of a marriage between, say, Jeremiah Shostak-Fielding and Maribel Johnson-Drexler ever learn to spell their full surname, provided that their parents could ever agree on just what it should be? And would that alliance completely unhinge data banks at the IRS?

Aesthetics often dictates against hyphenation. Says a Washington lawyer representing small businesses who was born Joel Rothstein and is married to a woman named Wolfson: "Rothstein-Wolfson is four syllables and 16 letters. Names get massacred enough. Wolfson becomes Wilson. Rothstein becomes Rothson. You can imagine what people would have done with the two together." But could they come up with a workable union of surnames without resorting to hyphens? "It was important for our kid's last name to be the same as ours," says the lawyer. "Otherwise, one parent gets left out." The solution: Rothstein gave up his last name and took his wife's. Joel is now a Wolfson, just like his wife and their child.

Ideologically correct couples have ways of working things out. When Skye Kerr married Deane Rynerson, they manufactured a new name: Rykerson. Some couples give the father's surname to daughters and the mother's surname to sons. For their firstborn, Pierce Barker and Carol Frost of Friendship, Md., did not bother with family at all, nor were they intimidated by the perils of hyphenating. They gave the child the surname Roth-Tubman, after the author Philip Roth and the 19th century abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Similarly, in Newton, Mass., Harry Finkelstein and Jamie Kelem junked their surnames and became the Keshets, from the Hebrew for rainbow.

In any case, the Sammataro-Hutchinses have had it. They left the bar out on their youngest child's birth certificate. Even so, their eldest son Tynan, 8, wears the name with pride. "I'm the only one in class who has a hyphen." Perverse, perhaps, but some of us like it that way.

With reporting by Janice M. Horowitz/New York